What to expect from the biggest ever summit on social and behaviour change communication

Twelve hundred people will gather in Indonesia next week (16-20 April) for the grandly titled International Social and Behaviour Change Communication Summit, an event that could have a significant impact on meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The SDGs were negotiated, agreed, and will be implemented largely by governments. But their successful implementation will depend on what people do, what they think, and how they organise themselves. This is what the Summit will focus on. The health goal (Goal 3) envisages a dramatic drop in maternal mortality. That will require, as well as resourcing more antenatal clinics, more pregnant women attending, and being empowered to attend, those clinics.

The education goal includes a commitment to get children, especially girls, to go to school. That means hiring teachers and building more schools but it also means shifting the social norms that often mean that boys are privileged over girls when it comes to education. Similar issues accompany other goals. Doubling agricultural productivity means farmers knowing about, and understanding how to cultivate, new seed varieties. Reducing the numbers of deaths in a disaster depends on people knowing how best to protect themselves and their family when disaster strikes.

In order to shift harmful norms, change behaviour and amplify the voice of those who have most to win or lose from development action, we need to understand what people already know, how they communicate and how they can make their perspectives best heard. This is what the summit will focus on.

BBC Media Action was, together with Unicef, the Soul City Institute for Social Justice, and the Communication Initiative, invited by Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs (JHUCCP), to co-organise the Summit. It has been a tremendous example of collective action with excellent leadership from JHUCCP.

Three reasons why the summit matters

1. We know that, just as good communication is vital to improving lives, bad communication can kill. We saw examples of bad communication in the early stages of the Ebola epidemic in 2014, which made the situation far worse. It was only when people started getting the right information, in ways that enabled them to make the best plans for themselves, that the epidemic started to be contained. Like our co-organisers, we believe passionately that we need disciplined fora that help us as a sector understand what works and it is why we have called this the “what works summit”. The summit will be an intense, probably exhausting, opportunity to take a view on what is working and not working in supporting communication to save lives.

2. This work is in danger of being "siloed" and disorganised. There are many different ways of using communication from the kinds of approaches that we will be presenting on (see below) to new innovations in behavioural economics to new digital strategies and much else besides. It is vital for people engaged in these different endeavours to talk, connect and learn from each other. This is a second key objective of the conference.

3. We need to examine who sets the agenda for this work. The term “social and behaviour change communication” may sound like an effort to tell people what to do. But at the heart of this work is the opposite - enabling people to understand, discuss and work out for themselves what is in their best interests and how they can protect themselves and their communities and families. We will be discussing too how to make sure that it is people, not just governments or development agencies, who shape the future agenda for this work.

James Deane is director of policy and research at BBC Media Action

See a list of sessions featuring BBC Media Action at the 2018 International Social and Behaviour Change Communication Summit